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The first time you make a particular mistake, it’s far more emotionally affecting. The first time I made homemade pasta, I learned to roll it through my pasta roller, tightening one click after each pass, so that the dough became thinner and longer each time. And what I discovered is […]

There’s a board book our family must have read aloud 1,000 times when our kids were little. The last page was a tune with silly nonsense lyrics. The only trouble was, I thought the melody had an error, because it didn’t end on the tonic. Instead of do, it ended […]

I’m streamlining the “Dear People” style letter I send to one of my ensembles, in the hopes that it will be easier to complete consistently, and simultaneously more helpful to my singers. I created a locked template in InDesign, and I can easily update the text boxes after the weekly […]

What is school for? The state says, we need to teach the kids to pass the tests. Seth Godin says we need to teach kids two things: lead, and solve interesting problems. One popular line of reasoning you hear a lot says we should “help students stay competitive in a […]

Part of what makes the first few years of any job, and particularly leading a choral ensemble, difficult is the novelty. Everything is new, nothing can be codified. (Compare it even to a math teaching job, where the curriculum and even the daily teaching goals might be standardized within the […]

As conductors, as experts, we can be afraid to even give away even a little bit of the authority to the ensemble itself. But when I involve my students in repertoire decisions, I overwhelmingly come away inspired, aware of new music, and excited that they are excited. I don’t mean […]

I remember the first time I developed a writing callus in seventh grade. That must have been the time I began doing enough writing with a pencil to require a little physical buffer, and my finger obliged. (These days, I don’t do enough handwriting to build a new callus, but […]

I saw the headlines and I read poetry. I don’t think I was being an ostrich, sticking my head in the sand. (And I do think that breaking news reporting often gets essential facts wrong.) I read poetry because there was nothing I could do in that moment to change […]

I find a lot of success in batch processing. A good example is designing social media cover photos for our entire concert season at once. Today, I was able to quickly design a tiny workflow, so that each photo was created more quickly than the last. If I had waited […]

No matter how important your message is, if you can’t deliver it effectively, it’s lost. Teachers know this intimately – they learn quickly on the job that delivery is crucial to transmission. They’re done for if they can’t engage, think on their feet, integrate live feedback from their “audience”, and […]